Quotes about Human nature

We are all naturally self-righteous. It is the family disease of all the children of Adam.

Death is not natural for a state as it is for a human being, for whom death is not only necessary, but frequently even desirable.

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.

Man that is of woman born is apt to be as vain as his mother.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.

Hence it is great wisdom to know that we are nothing but sin, so that we do not think of sin as lightly as do the pope's theologians, who define sin as "anything said, done, or thought against the Law of God." Define sin, rather, on the basis of this psalm, as all that is born of father and mother, before a man is old enough to say, do, or think anything.

Thus mankind cannot approach the waters of salvation but can only be prepared for them. For Prov. 16:1 says: "It is the part of man to prepare the soul." But human nature was prepared in this way by the law of Moses, because the Law prepared but did not give, just as a boy is prepared by the tutor to be fit for his inheritance, but it is the father who gives it. Therefore Christ or the faithful people in the Law already seeks to enter into grace and the church of Christ.

The line between good and evil runs, not between 'us' and 'them', but down the middle of each of us.

The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature;

Sin" is not just "doing things God has forbidden." It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings.